The Robots Are Coming! They're Coming!

    It's bad enough we have to worry about illegal aliens taking our jobs away here in America.  Now we have to worry about Robots taking them.  The Japanese are planning to send more than 100,000 our way by 2010.  And what are they going to be doing?  Caregivers for the elderly!

 

     I'm an elder and I didn't ask for any shiny robot to take care of me.  I want some HUMAN contact not some whirring mechanical robot bringing me my coffee.   And what do you think they'll feed me for lunch?  Sushi, probably.  And sushi is not real food.  The name doesn't sound like  anything you

would want to put in your mouth that's for sure.

 

     I don't think the Japanese have really forgiven us for dropping The Bomb, so  I especially wouldn't want to trust a Japanese robot

 

     I realize that we are far behind Japan and China in terms of our use of robots.  General Motors

had them as early as 1960 but then the robots joined the union and there went that idea out the

factory window.

 

     Robots are already big in Japan and China...mainly working to build cars.  Now they'll probably put aprons on them and send them over here as caregivers.  I need someone who can

shave me and  I'm not trusting some Japanese robot to do it, especially one that's singing show tunes from Sweeney Todd.  In Japanese.

 

     I might look more favorably on the robots as caregivers if they made them look more human.

I could see me having one that looked like Aunt Bee, for example.  Nice little old lady robot with

a bun on the back of her metallic head and pinch-nosed glasses.  And she would have to be able to cook stuff like chicken fried steak, catfish and biscuits. Although if they're going to make them

human like, I'd pay extra to get a caregiver that looks like Pamela from Baywatch.  I live on a lake and having one that's a good swimmer would be handy.  She wouldn't have to cook; we could go down to the diner for breakfast and lunch.  Or I could get two robots...one that looks like Pam to be my lifeguard and one that looks like Aunt Bee to do the cooking and cleaning. She would need to go to bed early.

 

     One of the advantages I see in having a robot caregiver is that you wouldn't have to feed them.

Just give them a squirt of WD-40 ever once in a while.

 

     We've been very slow here in the U.S.  to adopt the use of robots.  It's really no wonder.  We

sent one up in the latest space shuttle.  It had to be sent in three parts and assembled once the

space shuttle landed.  It's 7 feet tall.  And it has arms that are 15 feet long.  They don't know what they will have it do.  Maybe he can play first base if they start a baseball team. With 15 foot arms he wouldn't miss many balls that came his way.  I know the government does some dumb

things, but why would they send a robot with l5 foot arms out in space with no plans for what he

was going to be doing?  His name is Derek, if you want to send him a postcard.

 

     There may be a lot of people out there who want a robot.  I googled the word on the computer and 57,400,000 entries came up.  Some  people are apparently buying kits to build their own

robots.  That's a do-it-yourself project that could go bad.  They even have a flying robot competition...birds and insect robots.  I have enough trouble with termites and rats.  I don't want

to have to hire Terminex to get rid of my insect robots.  But I didn't see anything in all the googled entries of any old guys wanting caregiver robots.  If the Japs send all those robots over

here and nobody wants them, I guess we could modify them slightly and we could put them

to work waiting tables at Hooters.

 

 

MOVING ON UP

When I was twelve years old, we lived in the tiny hamlet of Dallas.  Life was sweet.  We didn't have indoor plumbing because we lived a half a block from where the town sewer line stopped.  But we were happy.

 

Then suddenly we were moving to Washington, D.C.  My father was always in a quest for Big Money and he heard that he could make Big Money as an electrician in Washington.  We didn't sell our house or move our furniture because this was going to be a test run to see how we liked it.  The Big City awaited.

 

All the avenues in Washington are named after states...so being from North Carolina, we moved to North Carolina Avenue and it had a lot of people from North Carolina living there so we weren't the only dumb ones. 

 

Our first apartment (and I use the word loosely) had one room and a closet that had been converted to a little kitchen.  It was a basement apartment.  We weren't all the way underground.  When we sat in our room we could see people's legs as they walked by.  And every five minutes or so, a big streetcar would go clanking by rattling our windows as it flashed by.  We didn't have streetcars in Dallas; we didn't have buses either.

 

There was no bathroom in our apartment.  We had to go upstairs and use a bathroom that was also shared by people on the first floor of the building.  At least it was indoors.

 

We had no furniture so we went to a used furniture store near the apartment.  My father bought a double bed, one rocking chair and a small  table to hold our radio.  We used to gather around the radio to listen to our favorite programs...my mother and I sat on the bed; my father in the rocking chair.  We would sit and stare at the radio as if it were a tv.  I liked radio.  You had to create your own mental pictures of what was happening and I was good at that.  We ate our dinners sitting on the bed since we didn't have a table.

 

Actually we had one other room and that's where I slept.  It was the furnace room and I slept on a roller way bed.  There was just enough room to open the bed beside the furnace.  I had never seen a furnace before in my life and especially not one that big.  There was a pilot light but when the furnace came on, it was with a blast of fire that lighted the whole room and made me sure we were all going to be blasted back to North Carolina.  Scary.  Scary indeed.

 

The apartment had roaches which we all hated.  These weren't little roaches...they were big and they could fly.  We tried spraying them but they would grab the spray can and squirt us with it.  We put out Roach Motels, but they ate them.  They came out mainly at night and when I was sleeping in the furnace room and the furnace would blaze on, I could see them scurrying all over the place.  I slept with a broom and in the morning, I would use the broom to turn on the lights and give the roaches a chance to go wherever they go in the daytime.

 

My mother  cried and wanted to go home to North Carolina.  But my father was studying to get a journeyman's license and it was time for me to go to school.

 

The school was gigantic and it looked like a big brick castle.  It had high chain link fences all around the building and the playground.  On the first day of school, I went to three different front doors and they were all locked.  I could see kids on the playground but I couldn't figure out how to get into the school.  I went home and told my mother and father that there was no way to get in.  My father didn't like that answer and just said, "Well tomorrow you will find a way in."  And I did. You went onto the playground and they let everyone in at once.  I was really so frightened.  I was a nervous kid anyway.  But eventually I found the office and they welcomed me.  I had to take tests for most of the day.  They had what they called a "track system".  They had a college-bound track; a business track and a I-Hope-You-Can-Find-Work-of-Some-Kind track.  And each track had two sections: smart and smarter.  I got put in the college bound, smarter track.  This was the greatest blessing that probably ever happened to me because it gave me some direction in my life.  I was college bound!